IN THE DOZEN OR SO YEARS that I have been climbing, my mother has had approximately two things to say about the subject: Don't do it and Oh no you're not. The former might apply to a thousand-foot cliff, the latter to a twenty-thousand-foot peak. Being a good, dependable son, I never listened. Being a good mother, she wasn't surprised. I kept climbing, and after a while she seemed to get used to the idea that I was happiest while hanging off the side of a big chunk of rock. Even so, I never expected to get the kind of messages from her I began receiving via e-mail last spring:

To: Jboy

From: Momboyer

Subject: Mom Boyer's Hardbody Training Camp

Jogged two miles again last night. Even got your little brother to go with me. I've also been doing my pull-ups and finger exercises. Just wait until you feel my forearms. No wimps around here!

The upshot of this was that my sixty-six-year-old mother was going climbing with me. Our goal was Finger Rock, a slender digit of granite that thrusts emphatically skyward from the ridgeline of the Catalina Mountains, just north of Tucson. The Finger is sheer-sided, eighty feet tall, and rises from a much larger cliff at the top of a very steep canyon, four thousand feet above the city. The view is vertiginous. If you were to take one step southward from the top, which is the size of a patio table, you would drop several hundred feet before the first bounce and still have a long way to go. There is a small notch in the summit that you can stand in while bracing your shins against the rock, as if you were standing in an open washing machine. With a climbing rope and a cool head, this perch is quite safe--but you must resist the spin cycle.

Finger Rock is clearly visible from Tucson, and my mother had looked up at it hundreds of times over the years, ever since she was a child. The idea to climb it, however, was mine, and came about in a way that neither of us expected. About four years ago my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The initial prognosis was not good--she might die within the year. It was summer, and I flew home from Colorado (where I'd been climbing) the day after my father called with the news.

It was a difficult visit. My mother was reticent, and I didn't know what to say. Had my father been ill, he and I probably would have talked for hours. That was the nature of our relationship. But my mother and I rarely talked like that. We did things. We both spent summers in Alaska (she as a physician and I as a commercial fisherman), and usually we'd meet up for a week to backpack or otherwise see some new country. We'd drink beer in Anchorage biker bars or go up to Fairbanks for the Eskimo Olympics.

But there is little you can do for someone whose departure is suddenly imminent, and that summer I hoped that she already knew everything I couldn't quite say. Then things got better. She went through surgery and radiation therapy, and six months later her biopsies were still clean. Her odds improved. She began taking tamoxifen, which despite several nasty side effects (hot flashes and increased appetite among them) improved those odds further. A year passed, and then another, with no sign of a recurrence.

During this time my mother began making a list of things she wanted to do before she died. Some of these things were fairly typical--to travel to China and Africa--others less so. One day she said to me, "You know what I've always wanted to do? Walk from one end of the state to the other. People used to walk such vast distances, and we've all forgotten that. We're too hung up on the cars." She liked the sense of history that came from walking old Indian trails and watching the subtle changes in terrain. Walking made the world big again. But so did climbing, and I wasn't about to take a four-hundred-mile stroll. "Let's climb Finger Rock," I said. "Heavens, no!" she said. I figured that meant maybe.

A year later the answer was yes. We would attempt Finger Rock. "You only go around once," she said, "and maybe not all that long." She wanted three months to train. By this time she'd gained eleven pounds, largely because of the tamoxifen, and she was, by her own reckoning, in lousy shape. So she quit the drugs, went on a diet, and began running laps around the homestead. Two weeks later I began getting the e-mail updates.

Perhaps the biggest challenge had less to do with Finger Rock than it did with my mother's own fingers. As a result of her treatment, the digits of her left hand often seized up involuntarily. When this happened she had to pry them open with her other hand.

For rehab purposes I bolted a Simulator board to a crossbeam in my parents' carport. A few days later my father came home from work to find my mother hanging from plastic climbing holds, her feet partially supported by bungee-cord stirrups. He shook his head. "You're really going to do this, aren't you?" he said. He'd always hoped she'd take up tennis. My little brother, who still lived at home, had it worse. My mother figured that as long as she was getting in shape, he should, too. One evening I stopped by just as they were returning from a run. My brother was dripping with sarcasm as well as sweat: "Great idea, this climbing thing," he said.

THE TRAIL UP TO FINGER ROCK is five miles long, rocky, and very steep, so we went for hikes as well. The first couple weren't encouraging. Despite her jogging schedule, she was painfully slow on hills. If I hadn't inherited her impatience along with her adventurousness I probably would have been more sympathetic. Instead I began feeling a coach's frustration that we might not be ready on game day. Even hinting at that possibility would have started an ugly fight between us, however, so I kept my mouth shut and crossed my fingers. We still had several weeks.

In the meantime, she needed to learn to climb. We started out at Rocks and Ropes, the local climbing gym, which has indoor climbing walls thirty-five feet tall. After strapping her into a harness, we went over knots and belay techniques, then fit her with some rental climbing shoes. To my considerable relief, she showed no signs of acrophobia, and moved up the wall with surprising grace for a beginner. I was impressed. I looked at my friend Jason, the gym owner, who'd come out from his office to watch. He made a face that said, Not bad.

"Hey, that was kind of fun," she said once back on the ground. Still, the Finger made her nervous. "What if I just can't do it?" she would ask. "What if I freeze up?" I explained (again) that I would be above her and could easily support her weight with the rope. This seemed to reassure her. "I really don't want to be dragged up ignominiously like a sack of potatoes," she said, "but I'd like to have that option." Fair enough.

We went to the gym a second time, and then practiced rappelling off my upstairs porch, since rappelling is the only way to get off the Finger. Rappelling is the most counterintuitive aspect of climbing. Basically, it involves walking backward off a cliff while trusting your life to your equipment. She didn't seem to mind this, though, and by early April we were more or less ready.

On a Wednesday morning we headed out with packs full of camping and climbing gear. My longtime climbing partner, photographer Peter Noebels, came along, as did our friend Jim Malusa.

We had given my mother the lightest load in hopes that she could keep up, but by midday I was tempted to sneak some of my own weight into her pack. When we stopped to rest, she was always the first one up, saying, "Well, I think I'll plod on ahead since I'm the slowest." Twenty minutes later the rest of us would come around a bend in the trail and find her facing our way, trying not to look impatient.

It took six hours to make it up to the Finger's base. The trail winds and twists and doubles back, disappears into thickets of manzanita and shindaggers, climbs and drops and then rises again. But once you get to the Finger there's only one way to go: straight up. We dumped our packs in a tiny clearing on the ridge between the Finger and Prominent Point and sat staring up at our route.

My mother looked almost disappointed. She said, "That's it?" From a distance the Finger looks tall and impossibly steep, but from this vantage it was far less imposing. "I told you it was easy," I said. "But don't worry, it'll be interesting enough."

The plan had been to hike up, spend the night, and then climb in the morning when we were fresh, but after resting for an hour or so, my mother got fidgety. She left the shade of the oak we'd been sitting under and looked up at the rock again. "Well, I guess we might as well get this over with," she said.

WE ROPED UP AT THE BASE of the climb, and then I led up the first section. I pointed out the best holds as I went, but I couldn't guess how hard it would be for her. We had only practiced inside, where holds are purposefully bolted within reach; out here you had to take what the rock offered, and the climbing was far more subtle. Fifty feet up I secured a belay and took up the slack in the rope. "Climb away," I said.

She moved gingerly up the rock, feeling around for good edges to hold, then walking her feet up. Things went smoothly enough until she was about ten feet below me, when the only handhold was a sloping mantel of smooth granite at chin level. It was too low to pull on, too high to step on. There was another good hold above the mantel, but it was still out of reach. In the meantime, her arms had begun to quiver from the strain.

"Point your elbow up and push down with your palm," I said. Didn't work.

"I think I'm going to fall," she said shakily.

"No, you're not." I could have pulled her up, but I knew she'd be happier if she did it herself. Then she slapped her forearm onto the mantel, grunted upward, and grabbed the next hold. A minute later she was sitting beside me, looking distracted.

"Halfway there," I said.

"I did something to my arm," she said. She held up her forearm, which had a purple lump on it the size of an egg. I said, "Yikes." At first she thought she had torn a tendon, but all her fingers worked. "It's probably a hematoma," she said. "I think it's okay." She wanted to keep climbing.

The second pitch was easier, except for one tricky section where the holds again disappeared. This time she made it through without any damage, and soon joined me just below the top. What makes Finger Rock's summit especially rewarding is that you climb up the back side, with the rock between you and the valley, so you get the view all at once. I showed her where to wedge her legs, and she stood up, craning her neck in one direction and then the other.

"Oh, wow," she said, grinning. "Wow, wow, wow. You never get a perspective like this from the ground--never. This is really something." I climbed up next to her and sat down. We stayed there for quite a while, enjoying our unlikely perch and the afternoon breeze. I was still a little nervous about the rappel down, but she slid down the rope without hesitation.

After sunset the city lights glowed far beneath us, framed by the steep walls of the canyon. We ate dinner and drank a celebratory toast of tequila and fruit juice, then lay talking under the stars. My mother seemed more at ease than she had in a long time. We talked about family matters, about her cancer, about other adventures we might have. "You know, your father thinks I'm crazy for doing this with you," she said. "He really does. He thinks all this stuff you do is crazy. He doesn't get it. He doesn't understand why anyone would take so many risks. But I do."

On September 9, 1999, Jim Boyer was beginning a descent from the summit of a rock face in the Catalina Mountains, outside Tucson. A piece of equipment he was anchored to gave way. He fell more than one hundred feet to a ledge below and was killed.